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Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

Oh my god it is exactly like that. As though pushing spreadsheets at Goldman has anything to do with building a software product. But they know that, they just want you to know they worked at Goldman. Because Goldman.

I once worked under a CTO who remarked "it's not like we're going to hire a woman" after interviewing a female dev candidate, which would be horribly offensive even if he was just kidding (he wasn't kidding, I was shocked he even took the time to interview her).

There's definitely a sense of "startups are the new banking." It's frustrating because there are also a lot of good people, but man is there a glut of bros who fit all the worst stereotypes of old boys club business.

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|There's definitely a sense of "startups are the new banking."

We need a new word. "Startup" has essentially become as meaningless as "agile". Semantically, "startup" is now just an umbrella under which the same paper-pushers and conference-call-bros we were trying to escape from are convening.

I used to agree but I recently read this old quote from PG which nails it I think:

"A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup."

http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html

I have nothing but respect and admiration for PG, but I don't think he gets to unilaterally decide the meaning of words.

Wikipedia says a startup is "a partnership or temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model"[1]. The relevant Wiktionary entry defines it as a "new organization or business venture"[2], fairly similar to the OED's "newly established business" definition[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company

[2] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/startup

[3] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_eng...

As a counterpoint, the Wikipedia definition of startup was coined by Steve Blank sometime in the past ~5 years, so it's not exactly ancient history.

I think if we place emphasis on the word "scalable," PG + Blank's definitions are compatible. Both distinguish "startup" from "new company." I don't think most people would categorize building a tech company and starting a hair salon as the same activity because of the force multiplier of scale.

I can do one better. I went to a job fair type event with one of the cofounders of the company, and I was pushing a very qualified woman we met there. The cofounder told me, with a very thoughtful look on his face, "I'm not sexist... but I just don't like working with women."

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